Analyzing early impacts of California’s Local Control Funding Formula

This three-part series analyzes the early impacts of California’s 2013 adoption of the watershed Local Control Funding Formula. The state’s move effectively shifted control over spending decisions from the state legislature to local school districts and eliminated a slew of state-imposed spending rules that many local districts saw as impediments to doing the most with their dollars. At the heart of California’s initiative is a weighted student funding (WSF) model, designed to allocate funds on the basis of students and student needs and to let districts and schools drive decisions on how to use their funds. California has undertaken one of the nation’s largest WSF overhauls to date. As such, its experience is of national interest as more states move toward—or consider moving toward—weighted student funding.

Read Paper 1 “What did districts spend their new money on under a more flexible spending system?”

Read Paper 2 “How did districts distribute their state allocations across schools?”

Read Paper 3“To what extent is California’s initiative associated with an improved relationship between spending and student outcomes?